Case file · Sighting
Jaíba fall and blackout, Feira de Santana
On 12 January 1995 a luminous object was reported falling onto a farm in the Jaíba district east of Feira de Santana, Bahia. A large power cut followed across dozens of towns.
1995 CE · -12.25, -38.90 · status: disputed
The sceptical view
A meteor seen at the same time as an unrelated grid fault is the usual explanation. Nothing was recovered from the farm.
The researched reading
A light seen falling and a regional blackout, joined in the telling. A fireball and an ordinary grid fault explain it well, and nothing physical was ever recovered.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Something known, misidentified | 50% | A bright meteor (fireball) appears to fall "just over the hill" even when it burns out tens of kilometres up and far away, which is why witnesses often think it landed nearby. Nothing was found on the farm. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 18% | Large blackouts across interior Bahia were common on the 1990s grid; a grid fault coinciding with a fireball sighting needs no link between them. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 10% | Once the power failed, people connected the light and the outage, and the story grew as a single event. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 7% | A meteor large enough to produce electrophonic or electromagnetic effects is possible but not documented here. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 5% | Press reports of UFO "crashes" in Brazil in the 1990s were sometimes embellished, but there is no sign of a deliberate hoax. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 4% | With no trace, no data and thin documentation, there is little to support anything unknown. |
| Secret human technology | 3% | There is no known military activity in the area; a falling rocket stage would show in launch records. |
| Undetermined | 3% | The share the reading had given to fabrication on doubt rather than evidence: the record does not settle it either way. |
Official position: No official investigation is known; the usual explanation is a meteor coinciding with an unrelated power failure.